Terms of service

1. Who “we” and “you” are

We are PCN Ventures UG (haftungsbeschränkt), of Eislebener Str. 5, 10789 Berlin, registered at Amtsgericht Berlin (Charlottenburg) under HRB 225664 B. The legal notice has the rest.

You are whoever holds the account. If you open one on behalf of a company or another organisation, you are telling us you may bind it, and “you” then means both you and it.

A consumer is someone acting outside their trade, business or profession. Consumers have rights under EU and German law that no contract can take away, and where anything here would do so, the law wins and the clause simply does not apply to you. §13 and §15 say where that bites.

2. Accepting these terms, and who may

You accept them by creating an account or by using the service.

You need to be at least 18 and able to enter a contract where you live. You need to give an email address that reaches you: your sign-in codes, your briefs and everything we are required to tell you are sent there.

3. Your account

You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address. There is no password to phish, reuse or leak. Anyone who can read that inbox can sign in as you, so keep it to yourself; anything done in your account counts as done by you, except where we were at fault. If you think someone else has got in, write to hi@pidgeon.fyi.

4. What we provide

You create pidgeons: a prompt saying what you want to know about, how often you want to hear, and which sources to look in. A pidgeon searches public web sources — news search, Hacker News, Reddit, dev.to, Product Hunt and technology publications’ feeds, among others — and language models decide which findings are relevant and write a short brief, which we email to you and show in the app.

You can mark a finding relevant or not relevant, in the app or with a link in the email. That steers how the pidgeon judges what it finds next.

You can share a pidgeon by link. Whoever opens it sees its name, summary and prompt, never what it found, and can make a copy for themselves.

Every brief has a one-click unsubscribe, which stops the email for that pidgeon. You can pause a pidgeon or delete it, and deleting it deletes everything it found.

Pidgeon is free for now, up to 20 pidgeons an account. There is no paid plan today, and we may slow down or limit an account that uses an unusual amount of the service. If we introduce one, its price and terms will be published, and you will be asked to agree to them before anything is charged; nothing you have on the free plan will start costing money without that.

5. What a pidgeon brings back is not advice

Pidgeons read other people’s websites and feeds, and use language models to judge and summarise what they find. Both can be wrong, and you should read a brief with that in mind:

• Sources are third parties. We do not control what they publish, whether it is accurate, or whether they stay available. A source can change, rate-limit us or disappear, and a pidgeon then finds less or nothing there.
• Model output can be wrong or incomplete. A pidgeon can miss something that mattered, keep something that did not, or summarise a finding inaccurately. Follow the link before relying on it.
• A brief is not advice. Not financial, investment, legal, medical or any other professional advice, and not a recommendation to do anything. A pidgeon that watches a company’s stock tells you what was published, not what to buy.

The articles and posts a brief links to belong to their publishers. A brief gives you a title, a short excerpt and a link; reading or reusing the original is between you and its publisher.

6. Acceptable use

The rule underneath all of it: watch for things, not for a person. If a clause below does not cover something you are about to do, that sentence does.

You may not use a pidgeon, its prompt or a shared link to:

• Track, profile or harass a private individual — to follow where someone is, compile what is published about them, monitor a former partner, or gather material to intimidate, expose or pressure anyone. Following what a public figure or a company says and does in public is ordinary; following a private person is not, however public the sources.
• Store, share or link to anything that is illegal where you are, where we are, or where the reader is.
• Publish, through a shared pidgeon, content that harasses, threatens or defames someone, or incites violence.
• Overload or abuse a source: create pidgeons, accounts or copies in order to multiply requests, work around a source’s limits or our own, or reach anything that is not public.
• Probe, scan or interfere with the service or other people’s accounts. Genuine security research is welcome and goes to hi@pidgeon.fyi — tell us before you test, not after.
• Resell the service, or run it for others in a way that hides who is actually using it.

Mind what you share. A shared link shows your prompt to anyone who has it, and they can pass it on. Do not put anything in a prompt you share that you would not want read by a stranger.

How we find out. From reports to hi@pidgeon.fyi, and from what our systems see of how pidgeons run: how often, how many, and against which sources. A report should say which shared link or account, and what the problem is.

What we do about it. Where a pidgeon breaches this section we may pause it or delete it, and for a serious or repeated breach suspend or close the account. We tell you why and do the least that addresses the problem, except for content that has no innocent version, which we remove at once and report where the law requires it.

Telling us we got it wrong. Reply to the notice or write to hi@pidgeon.fyi. A person reads it, and a decision that turns out to have been wrong is reversed. If you are in the EU and we have restricted or removed something of yours, the Digital Services Act gives you the right to a statement of reasons, to an internal complaint, and to an out-of-court dispute settlement body. The notice we send is that statement of reasons, this paragraph is that internal complaint, and the legal notice names the authority that supervises us.

7. Your content is yours

We claim no ownership of your prompts, your pidgeons or your feedback. You grant us the narrowest licence that running the service requires: to store them, send them to the language models and sources that do the work, show them to you, and, when you share a pidgeon, show its name, summary and prompt to whoever has the link. That licence ends when you delete the pidgeon or your account.

Your feedback also improves the service. Taken together across everyone, which findings people mark relevant or not tells us which sources and which ways of judging work, and we use that to make pidgeons better for everybody. The privacy policy says what that involves.

You keep the responsibility for your prompts: that you may write them, and that what you ask a pidgeon to watch for does not break these terms or the law.

8. Our side of the intellectual property

The service, the software behind it, the Pidgeon name and the design are ours or our licensors’. Nothing here transfers any of it to you beyond the right to use the service under these terms.

If you send us an idea or a suggestion we may use it without owing you anything for it, so that a good suggestion does not create a question about who owns the next release.

9. Ending it

You can stop at any time. Delete your pidgeons in the app; to delete your account, write to privacy@pidgeon.fyi from the address you sign in with, and we will delete it and everything in it. The privacy policy says what outlives that, and for how long.

We may end it too, with 30 days’ notice to your email address, if we stop offering the service or stop offering it to you. For a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or where the law requires it, we may end it immediately, and we will tell you why unless we are forbidden to.

10. Availability

We do not promise any uptime on the free plan and will not pretend to. A pidgeon can run late, skip a run, or send a brief late, and a source it relies on can be unavailable. We may take the service down for maintenance, and where it is planned we will try to say so in advance.

11. Changes to the service and to these terms

The product changes; that is what a product under development does. Where a change removes something you rely on, we will tell you at your email address before it takes effect.

The same for these terms. A change takes effect 30 days after we tell you, except where it is required by law or is entirely in your favour, in which case it can be sooner. If you do not accept a change, stop using the service before it takes effect.

12. Warranties, and what they are worth

We provide the service with reasonable care and skill, and we will not knowingly do any of the things these terms and the privacy policy say we will not do.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that a pidgeon will find everything relevant, that what it brings back is accurate, or that it is fit for a purpose you have not told us about.

If you are a consumer, none of that reduces your statutory rights. The EU rules on digital content and digital services give you remedies for a service that does not conform to what was agreed, and this clause does not touch them.

13. Liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, for wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by the rest of this section.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings.
• We are not liable for decisions you make on the strength of a brief, or for what a pidgeon missed, kept or summarised wrongly (§5).
• Our total liability for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in that period and one hundred euros.

That cap is low because the service is free. If you need a higher one, write to legal@pidgeon.fyi rather than rely on a clause that does not say what you need.

14. Your liability to us

If you are using Pidgeon for business purposes, you will cover us for claims brought against us by a third party that arise from your prompts, from a pidgeon you shared, or from your breach of these terms. This clause does not apply to consumers.

15. Governing law, and where a dispute goes

These terms are governed by the law of Germany, excluding its conflict of laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Disputes go to the courts of Berlin.

If you are a consumer, that sentence does not move you. You keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in, and you may bring a claim in the courts there; we will only bring one against you in your own country’s courts. The legal notice explains the consumer dispute bodies and names our supervisory authority.

Before any of that: write to legal@pidgeon.fyi. Most things are a misunderstanding and take a paragraph to fix.

16. The rest

Notices. We write to the email address you sign in with; you write to legal@pidgeon.fyi or to the registered office in the legal notice. Both count as writing.

Assignment. You may not transfer these terms without our agreement, and we will not unreasonably withhold it. We may transfer them to a company that acquires this business, and we will tell you before we do.

Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands and that clause is read down to what is enforceable.

No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not mean giving it up.

Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control.

Entire agreement. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the service.

Language. These terms are written in English, and the English text governs.